Friday, May 23, 2008

This morning, while taking a short run, I thought about what I was going to write about later in the afternoon. And wouldn't you know it, just before I started to write something -- now, I don't even remember what I was going to write about -- I heard the news story on Hillary Clinton's latest "rationale" for remaining in a race she cannot possibly win.

Her husband, she pointed out, didn't wrap up the Democratic nomination in 1992 until June, when he won California (actually, it was March). But then, for some inexplicable reason, she mentioned that June 1968 was when Bobby Kennedy was assassinated, and implied that you just never know what might happen.

Keith Olbermann, who never misses and has been especially sharp during the presidential campaign, has been one of the few MSM commentators to call it like it is on Hillary's gutter-level tactics. Tonight, he completely outdid himself.

UPDATE: Let's be clear about something here: there is absolutely no defending Hillary's latest and, without a doubt, most offensive and thoughtless "gaffe" of the campaign. As usual, the Beltway bloviators are missing the point. What she meant is secondary to why she felt the need to say something so stupid and desperate. The Obama-Clinton race was over in February. Her justification for staying in the race has nothing to do with raising important issues passed over by the "establishment" candidate (McCarthy in 1968) or calling attention to a "forgotten" constituency (Kennedy in 1968). She has not picked up a Senate endorsement since February and has not moved an uncommitted superdelegate in months. Her campaign is now reduced to heeding on the fears and prejudices of poor and working-class white voters (a group to which she has openly appealed to vote based on race), hardly the "base" the Queen of Chapauqua imagined for herself in January 2007. Right now, narcissism has trumped any other consideration. How can anyone so tone-deaf, insensitive and incapable of a measured response to any criticism consider herself presidential?

Keith Olbermann has been great. All the other "commentators" in the MSM continue to play a senseless parlor game that makes fantasy baseball look like the real world. Olbermann isn't part of the Washington political-media complex, and has the guts to say what needs saying. I simply cannot understand how anyone can defend Hillary's behavior at this point. Any other candidate pulling the nonsense she has would have been run out of the campaign by the same people who, for God knows what reason, continue to enable her so they can speculate about her nonexistent chances of winning a nomination she has long lost.

Olbermann's coverage of this campaign has been especially awful. In his own words, from his own report:

"Earlier tonight here on MSNBC, Obama's chief strategist David Axelrod giving Sen. Clinton the benefit of the doubt, saying he honestly did not believe Sen. Clinton was citing a possible assasination as a reason for staying in the race."

And then from Howard Fineman:

"Most fair minded people would say, 'Well, lets give her the benefit of the doubt.'"

But, somehow, it was worth almost 20 minutes of airtime, 10 of which were of Olbermann's borderline incoherrent rant about the "trauma" that the comment had caused to the American people.

This, along with much of Olbermann's coverage of the race, is nothing more than the artificial inflation of the trivial. It seems that he really doesn't like Hillary. He sure does seem to like to hear himself talk however. That is not journalism.

A more detailed analysis: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0508/10604.html